I narrated all this in harrowing detail. At least, I thought I did. A decade on, C. claimed the sketch had been much more schematic.
I described the late night visit, Christmas the year before. Just after I'd dropped my bombshell, the revised career plans. Dad wobbling into my room like a parasite-bloated puppy. Sitting on the foot of my bed, grasping me with anesthetized claw. Waking me from a lesser nightmare. "Rick. Lss. Listen. Don't."
Spooky, ghoulish. Lead-in to liquid panic. I felt my throat clamp again, even relating this thin simile version.
Don't what?
"Don't change. Stay."
"Dad. Go back to bed." I mimed my own lines for her, in the voice of the child parent. Caretaking commenced early, in the kids of my family. "Sleep it off. It'll all be over in the morning." Or soon enough thereafter.
"Rek. Listen. Stay in science. The world needs. ."
I told her how I'd disappointed him, embittered my father's holdout hope. Bricked up the last loophole he saw for his future. I was supposed to redeem the sad disaster Dad had made of life. And now I would never salvage anything, in my father's or anyone's eyes.
How could I tell this woman details that made me retch to hear? Maybe I tried to make her run. Test her Good Samaritan threshold of horror. She stayed put. She listened all the way up to McGee's cancer and instant disintegration. Almost a reprieve, I confessed in shame. The only thing large enough to displace the first sickness. I held back on one detail — Dad's I-told-you-so grins from inside the debilitating chemo: You always thought your old man would die of drink.
C. sat through it. At one pained silence, she grazed my upper arm. Exemption or encouragement — it didn't matter. Aside from that, we did not touch.
"Why am I telling you all this?"
"It's easier when you don't know someone."
But I do know you, I wanted to object. The first person I didn't have to get to know. The first person I've ever met more alone than I am.
Sick of myself, I tried to draw her out. She reciprocated out of kindness. She said she was studying comparative literature. "It means" — she smiled, defending herself from the ghost of my father —"that I haven't accepted reality yet."
Change of schools had delayed her life by a year. By taking overloads, she would finish almost on time. "I don't know what my hurry is." She laughed. "It's not as if there are a lot of entry-level openings for literature comparers."
This illusion, born in mutual sadness. Because I'd spilled everything, because she in turn lapsed into long, shameless silences, we could pretend we'd been conversing since childhood. No need to gloss. No fill of awkward gaps. Words seemed almost an afterthought, casual noise. Still here. Fear not. Still here.
After we said everything we felt like, we stopped. We sat together, listening to the sparrows take their everyday, bewildered offense. The last day of innocence, of instant companionship without groundwork or explanation. The last year when one could make a friend.
When she spoke again, I jumped. I'd forgotten about speech, or why one would ever resort to it.
"So will you go home for a while?"
I nodded. The short moratorium of mourning. Knowing's intermission, before the return of routine.
Some part of this may have come later. Maybe I conflated the different times we met in that spot, that season, by contrived chance. I've made a career of rewriting. C. used to say that everything was always outset with me. She came to know me so uncomfortably well. How my mind collapsed everything back to Go. How I would end with a head full of opening lines.
Midmorning grew cold. We sat closer. " 'May will be fine next year,' " C. said, lapsing into beginner's anonymity.
I heard belatedly. "What was that again?"
"What?" Her throat closed. She bolted for cover. What did I do wrong? A question promoted to refrain, in time. And how rapidly already in C.'s eyes turned into again.
Here, at the first cross-purpose, I was too startled to stop and reassure her. "Whatever made you say that?"
"Say what?" The Samaritan would fight, if frightened enough.
" 'May will be fine.. ' "
"Oh, that!" She smiled, goofy, breathing again. "It's a line from my parents' English book. Sitting here — this temperature, this wind?" She tried to defuse me. I nodded: keep talking. "I felt so wide open all of a sudden. So — anything. That's what made me think of it."
"English book?"
"As a second language. For adults. A hand-me-down from another South Side family. They came five years before my parents. That's a whole generation, where I come from."
"Is there another line, just after that?"
"Yes. Wait. 'Father hopes to plant roses in the front yard.' All these short narrative vignettes. Incidents you might live. Let's see."
She closed her eyes, to help her visualize. Thought looks up, or off, or in. Away from the distraction of what is. Would a thinking machine, too, turn its simulated eyes away?
"Let's see. On the next page is one that starts, 'Mother goes to fetch the doctor.' Imagine my brother trying to explain to his parents, at age ten, why mothers do to doctors what dogs do to sticks."
I tried.
"That doctor bit was handy, as it turns out. They lived that one." She dropped back into her astonished quiet. "So what's your interest in that May one?" You been holding out on me, Immigrant?
"It's a line from a nostalgic Housman poem. You see, there's this comprehensive I'm supposed to be studying for." The weakening sun cut a peach gash in the side of November the seventh. Summer looked for a last route to the surface, but could not find it.
"Housman?"
"You know. Best years behind you. Poet dying young, kind of thing."
"So what's next?"
"Well, I don't know. I suppose a tech writing job at 24K, a mortgage, a finished den full of kids, and early brain death."
"No!" She laughed. "I mean the poem. 'May will be fine next year.' What happens next?"
"Oh. 'Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.' "
C. laughed. "I'll only be twenty."
"I'll be twenty-two."
'That gives you two whole years yet." Her eyes were brown and enormous, daring me. "Whole lifetimes can play out in the space of two years."
"Whole lifetimes," I echoed. Maybe that's all I ever did: echo her. See what she had to say. Get her to commit, then fall back on accommodation.
We caught eyes. We looked for longer than either thought we should. For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not Are you who I think you are? Am I who you think I am?
"Thanks," I said, taking her fingers when we stood and stretched. "Sorry to unload on you, but I must have needed it."
"I wish you'd unloaded more."
"You have a class?" I said, instead of what I should have.
"I've just missed two," C. apologized. An awkward confession to make to one's teacher. "You?"
I shrugged, pointed toward the meager downtown, toward departure, bus stations, all families waiting at the end of this spreading nexus.
C. started backing down the sidewalk that crisscrossed the green like huge suspender straps. "Have a safe trip home."
"See you," I said. My tag line. Still the only way I have to say goodbye. See you. What did it mean? No tense. Elliptical. Almost an imperative. It must have been the last thing I ever said to my father. See you.
C. lifted her hand, palm out. Then she turned the palm inward and placed it on her sternum. She hoisted her pack, swung on one foot, and walked away. I watched her disappear into the milling field of twenty-year-olds on their way to places none could begin to imagine.
Maybe I knew I was already gone. I still had to finish, though, before I could leave. Fall semester came to its Christmas close. My first incarnation as teacher ended. In the composition class, C. got one of a handful of A's. Our goodbye at semester's end was terse. I'd grown guarded with her and everyone else. My father had died at fifty-two, and the next thirty years seemed to me an academic exercise.